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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Politically Correct “Diversity” in Cartoons

From a Chicago e-mail correspondent.

The Public television station in Chicago has a weekly “local celebrity-amateur movie critic” feature for the recently released features. One of the latest reviewers was the weekend Fox TV anchor, and he watched “Prince Caspian,” the movie adapted from the C.S. Lewis book.

His two comments were that the plot was formulaic (and, in my humble opinion, if it was faithful to the books then there’s not much more you can ask for: that’s far more of a book criticism than a movie criticism): and he also said the movie “lacked diversity.”

This particular book was first published in 1951 in Great Britain. Lewis was about age 52 at that time, and its impossible to know exactly when the stories were written or even imagined. But it was certainly not anywhere after the very early post WWII period; Great Britain still had food rationing that continued even after 1951. It was hardly life as we know it it today. Lewis wrote a fantasy-it contains not only youngsters but talking animals, trolls and things like that.

I really think its more of a comment on the current mindset that all movies must have black actors (down to the idea that if you have a cartoon one of the voices must be Queen Latifah or Eddie Murphy) or else its unacceptable today. Left unmentioned (and also unquestioned by the PBS host) was the basic premise “so where would you want to see ‘diversity’ inserted into this movie? And would that have been fair to C.S. Lewis’ work?”

This is another example of political correctness, and it brings to mind the proposed statute of the World Trade Center-Ground Zero picture. Either you like the original snapshot or novel or you don’t; but you cannot change an artist’s work to suit your PC needs for “diversity.”

If there is any area of American life in which blacks have “made it,” it’s the entertainment industry.

And, in spite of a bit of affirmative action here and there (we still remember the silly Sidney Poitier movies from the 60s) they have made it on the basis of talent. So issues like this are the very last place where anybody should be playing the race card.